Exclusive Video: Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Taps Into The Magnificent Desolation of Ruin Porn

In a summer when White House Down director Roland Emmerich will lay waste to Washington, D.C., for the third time in his career, one of the most hotly anticipated video games of the year will demonstrate that there are still new ways to devastate our nation’s capital with striking visual flair.

If Emmerich is the Guy Fieri of urban cataclysm—Flavortown Go Boom!—the developers at Naughty Dog, which, through Sony Computer Entertainment America, will release The Last of Us exclusively for the PlayStation 3 on June 14, are more akin to Italy’s Slow Food movement. Their tense, visceral, and violent survival action game—deemed a “masterpiece” by the gaming site IGN—presents a richly developed vision of what Washington and other American cities and towns would look like if nature reclaimed them 20 years after most plumbers, landscapers, and construction workers were turned into zombies. (The game’s fictional pandemic is unleashed by the very real Cordyceps fungus, which should give you pause if you take it as a nutritional supplement to improve brain function.)

The Last of Us is a thinking man’s post-pandemic tale, with a story that’s much closer to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and The WalkingDead than it is to, say, Left 4 Dead or Dead Rising. The game is bleak and relentless—a world where uninfected humans can be even more lethal than the zombies. But visually, there are also moments of stunning beauty. Post-apocalyptic settings are nothing new in the gaming world, but the level of attention that Naughty Dog—the developer behind the much-loved Uncharted games—has lavished on the settings for The Last of Us brings to mind the words that Buzz Aldrin uttered when he set foot on the moon’s surface: “magnificent desolation.”

For inspiration, Naughty Dog’s development team set their browsers in search of ruin porn, the genre of photography that finds beauty in the decay of abandoned man-made structures. Google Robert Polidori’s haunting images of the classrooms and homes swiftly vacated during the evacuation of Chernobyl or visit Web sites such as DerelictLondon.com and 28DaysLater.co.uk that delight in the inevitability of entropy and nature.

“It was interesting to learn how much pushing back against nature we have to do just to maintain the status quo of our cities,” says the game’s creative director, Neil Druckmann. In the three-and-a-half-year process of developing the game, which ultimately involved approximately 200 people, the Naughty Dog team turned to David Oshinsky’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Polio: An American Story, and Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us for inspiration along with a cache of ruin-porn sites that included UrbanExplorers.net,Fallout Urban Exploration, and SleepyCity, as well as the sites mentioned above.

From a graphic point of view, the sites are “so intriguing because it’s primarily all-natural lighting,” game director Bruce Straley says. “It’s some really nice camerawork and really good lenses, and it lends itself to what we’re doing with the game’s principal characters, Joel and Ellie.”

The former is a middle-aged smuggler who has witnessed and engaged in all kinds of horror over the last 20 years, since the pandemic began. Ellie, on the other hand, is a 14-year-old adolescent who was born in a quarantine camp and is seeing the untamed outside world for the first time.

“Put those characters together, and you’ve got some interesting tension,” says Straley, adding that exploring the game environment is designed to produce a similar tension between “the familiar and the unfamiliar, such as seeing that the subway tunnel that you used to commute to work through every day is now a rushing river, or that your favorite coffee shop is now overgrown.

“That juxtaposition became very intriguing,” Straley continues, explaining that the challenge for the designers was “to create a sense of exploration that you’re going to places [that] feel taboo or normally forbidden.”

Against this richly detailed backdrop of nature victorious, Joel and Ellie’s humanity—and the different ways in which they process their experiences—resonates much more palpably than it would in a more stock video-game setting. “You get to see the world through a survivor’s eyes, where he’s just worried about what’s going to be lurking around the corner and: ‘How do I survive? What do I need to do to survive another day?’” Straley says of Joel. “Versus Ellie’s point of view, which is like ‘Holy crap, this street is flooded and we’re, like, swimming inside a motel, and it’s gorgeous.’”